Freelance
Traveller

Editor’s note: The initial Fifth Imperium column was
published on the RPG.Net website in July 2009, and appeared in Freelance
Traveller’s initial issue in November 2009. This column originally
appeared on the RPG.Net website in October 2010, and in Freelance Traveller
Issue 011
in November 2010.

In recent months I’ve investigated a unique way of creating
adventures in Traveller: by choosing a
specific genre and then adapting it for play within your
Traveller universe. The previous articles
in this series have covered mysterious stuff, spooky stuff, and
fantastic stuff.

This month I’m going to take a look at a trio of two-fisted action
genres, all centered more on physical activity than cerebral thoughts:
adventure, war, and westerns. In the process I’ll talk about how these
genres can produce great Traveller
stories. In many ways I think that they are some of the best alternate
genres for Traveller because they tend to
be more about the activities than the settings (with the possible
exception of westerns), meaning that they can fit into the
Traveller setting fine.

The Adventure Genre (and Pulp)

Though the pulp genre could widely include all of the magazines
published in the first half of the 20th century, when we speak of it as
a genre, we’re generally talking about the adventure heroes like Doc
Savage, The Shadow, and Tarzan and their modern-day descendants like
Indiana Jones and even James Bond. Thus, the genre shades into espionage
(covered in my first article) and super heroes (covered in my third).

The most important attribute for a pulp adventure is action itself:
you want to put the PCs in physical danger and to require them to make
daring escapes from relentless foes. However, if you really want to
convey the feel of adventure pulps to your players, you probably need to
use some of their common tropes.

The best one for Traveller is doubtless
the “Lost World”, where a hitherto unknown civilization is discovered,
probably amidst savages. They might be a lost colony from the Vilani
Imperium that’s maintained their technology or something even older,
such as contemporary of the Ancients (in age if not technology). It’d be
easy to place such a World in the outskirts of the Imperium, such as in
the Spinward Marches—or even in the backwaters of a more civilized
system. Combine that with frenetic action and constantly escalating
danger and you'll have a great start to an adventure-genre adventure.

Searches for lost artifacts of the ancient past are another closely
related subgenre that would work well with
Traveller. Though these could be TL 16 artifacts from the
Darrians or the Vilani, it’d be more pulpish if they are ancient,
mystical items from the even further past (though one must suspect that
they eventually have some technological basis).

Traveller
References. GDW didn’t tend to go in this direction in their
adventures. Shadows is a fine example of
an adventure about exploring an ancient culture, but it was more of a
dungeon crawl than a pulp adventure. Some of the FASA adventures feel
more pulp-y to me, particularly Uragyad'n of the
Seven Pillars, but I think that's more a matter of setting than
genre—which suggests that setting is very important to your presentation
of genre adventures.

Other References. The pulp adventure genre has been
treated well in recent years and so there’s plenty of places you could
go to for material. I think that any of the Indiana Jones movies could
be fine background for Traveller
adventures, but they’d require some obfuscation due to their popularity.
I’m also fond of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong books, though they trend more
toward super-heroes at times. If you go back to the hey-day of pulps,
you could use just about anything that suits your fancy, and that’d have
the advantage of being material that your players probably aren’t
familiar with.

The War Genre

The war genre of course centers around the activity of war: taking
territory, spying on the enemy, and (unfortunately) destroying the
morale of enemy civilians. It also focuses on a number of themes:
brotherhood, loyalty, courage, patriotism, and (unfortunately)
xenophobia.

The Traveller universe itself offers
plenty of places to tell war stories. To start with, you have any number
of balkanized governments. Even if a world isn’t government level 7,
there might be competing populations. The battle between natives and
corporations is a constant one in the universe of
Traveller.

Moving up to the next level, you can have wars between planets. They
might be fighting over some supposedly neutral resource or over some
ancient wrong, whose specifics are long-forgotten. Beyond that you have
wars between interstellar governments. In the Spinward Marches, the
Darrians and the Sword Worlders are always at each others’ throats, but
it’s the Fifth Frontier War (1107-1110) which will offer the best
opportunity for wartime stories.

And, there are plenty of them. The PCs could be mercenaries coming in
to help one or the sides or just to train them. You’ll probably have
more meaningful stories, though, if one or more of the PCs is actually a
member of a world or state that’s at war. Will they run arms for their
home country? Fight? Does it put two members of a PC group at odds?

If you don’t want the depressing day-to-day of wartime, then you can
use it to send off PCs on auxiliary missions: to retrieve some info or
some object that’s crucial to the war effort, to save some general, or
to negotiate a peace with some third-party who must stay neutral, lest
the good guys (whoever they actually are in wartime) be overcome. While
playing with any of these plot threads, just be sure to include wartime
action: gunfights with agents from the other side; the need to save
populations caught in the middle; and the patriotic desire to keep those
flags flying!

Traveller
References. The classic Traveller
corpus is full of great wartime adventures set in the Fifth Frontier
War. Background material and an Amber Zone can be found in
JTAS #9, which announced the war. GDW’s
Expedition to Zhodane and
Broadsword are adventures set in the
middle of the War. FASA offered their Fifth Frontier War adventure in
Ordeal by Eshaar, while QuickLink
Interactive published an unfinished series of Golden Age EPIC Adventures
in the same time period. Finally, the Keith brothers’
Flight of the Stag adventures offered yet
another perspective of the war.

Though not exactly a war, the bug hunts found in
TravellerDouble
Adventure 5: The Chamax Plague / Horde also fit into the war
genre.

Other References. This is another situation where
the genre is large enough that you can probably pick up any book or show
that interests you. Personally I enjoyed the TV show
Band of Brothers for a realistic look at
war. If you want a more literary view, Garth Ennis wrote two interesting
volumes of War Stories for DC Comics.

The Western Genre

Of the three action genres presented here, the western is the one
most tied to a specific setting. But, it doesn’t have to be the United
States of the 1800s. Rather, the setting for a Western can be any
frontier where men are lawless, life is cheap, and justice is rare. More
than one creator has drawn the connection between those themes and the
setting of science-fiction. Gene Roddenberry called
Star Trek a “wagon trail to the stars” and
explicitly marketed it as a western, while Firefly even took up the
trappings of the western.

The easiest way to play upon the western genre in
Traveller is simply to play up the idea of
the frontier: that the PCs are out there on their own and that bandits
and other outlaws might be just around the corner. Of course, you
shouldn’t forget the precepts of the western as an action genre. Mainly,
that means gunfights and duels paired with gambling and other less
high-brow activities.

Within the Imperium, you really need to go to the outskirts to find
the proper material for a western—as the Imperium itself is just too
civilized. In the Spinward Marches, District 268 and Five Sisters are
the best places for this sort of adventure, though you could also
introduce western elements on any low-tech planet or on any planet off
the traditional Xboat lines.

When you put together a Western adventure, you could place the PCs in
the roles of protagonists or antagonists. They could be the outlaws
robbing the poor folk of the area or the poor folk of the area who are
beset upon by outlaws. Alternatively, a “Seven Samurai” adventure is
always a favorite, where the PCs are called in to protect a village from
bandits. Prospecting for valuable minerals is another western favorite
that can tie in well with the Traveller
world of belters and other miners. You just need to introduce some
outlaw elements there too, perhaps presenting a mineral find that’s
beyond the reach of the law.

Traveller
References. Not a lot of Traveller
material has explicitly referenced the western, so you might be
trailblazing new ground.

Other References. Joss Whedon’s
Firefly is the most perfect combination of
western and science-fiction that you can imagine. Without the explicit
trappings, you could probably grab many episodes for your
Traveller usage.

Conclusion

That’s it for my look at how to use the more action-oriented genres
in Traveller. Though there are many more
genres that I could cover here, I’m just going to touch upon one more,
next month: science-fiction. There are numerous sub-genres of
science-fiction which could each provide you with interesting and unique
Traveller adventures.

If you want more genre thoughts, let me point you to a new RPGnet
column, Tropes. It’s offering an excellent, in-depth look of a different
genre each month. October’s Tropes focus in on pulp adventure, nicely
tying to this article; take a look for much more information than I
could possibly provide on the topic.